In the old days, when you wanted someone to share their photos with you, you'd ask for "doubles"—which meant they'd get two prints of the pics and give you the second. In the current digital world, your photos, your friends' and families' photos, and photos of you are spread everywhere. So we thought it might be useful to bring the idea of doubles into the digital world.

What You'll Get

When you're done with this post, pictures you've uploaded to Facebook, Flickr, Instagram, and everywhere else will automatically appear in "double" form in Dropbox. Pictures people tag you in on Facebook will likewise automatically download to your computer. Even the images you see on the internet—on any web site or anywhere—can be added to your "doubles" in a click of your mouse. Here's how to set it up.

What You'll Need

You need two basic services for this to work. One to link your various accounts together and the other to store your photos.

If This Then That: If This Then That (ifttt) is a service that let's you plug information from one service into another—basically, you tell it that when one thing happens (e.g., you post a picture to Instagram), it should do another thing (e.g., place that picture in a folder in your Dropbox account called "Doubles"). With a few clicks, we're going to set it up to send all your pictures from a variety of services into a specific Dropbox folder.

Dropbox: The cloud storage service Dropbox is the holding bin for all the pictures. Every time you take a picture you'll get a double sent to Dropbox automatically.

That's all you need, so let's get those pictures organized.

Send Every Photo You Take to a Single Folder

Provided you use a web service that ifttt supports, you can create simple actions that upload pictures you take (or you're tagged in) directly to your Dropbox folder. In some cases you can also limit this to specific tags, or organize the pictures automatically into subfolders.

The process for sending all your pictures to one Dropbox location is the same for all the photo services ifttt supports—including Facebook, Instagram, Flickr, and Foursquare. Many of these are already set up for you on ifttt's recipes page, but they're easy to create and customize for yourself. Watch the video at the top of the post for a quick overview of how to set up a custom ifttt trigger, or, for more details, read on.

Step 1: Choose Your Trigger Channel

From the ifttt Dashboard select "Create a Recipe" and then click "this." You'll see a menu with all the services ifttt supports. To create a trigger that sends your photos to Dropbox select the photo service you want to use. You will need to set up a new trigger for each service.

Step 2: Choose Your Trigger and Dump All Your Photos Into Dropbox

When you select your service you're given an option to choose a trigger. Each service has their own set of different triggers that do different actions. The simplest method for creating doubles is to choose "Any new photo" so that any photo you take will be automatically head over to your Dropbox folder. When you're done, click "Create Trigger."

Step 2.5 (Optional): Set Up Triggers with Tags to Send Them to Specific Folders

If you use Instagram or Flickr you have one more great option: "New photos by you tagged." If you select this option you can tag your photos with a label (#vacation2012 for instance) and then send them to a specific folder in Dropbox (we'll get to that in step four). This way you catch all your digital doubles and organize them at the same time.

For Facebook you can also set up a custom trigger when someone tags you in a photo by selecting the "You are tagged in a photo" option. Regardless of which options you choose remember that you can set up multiple triggers for each service and organize photos however you like.

Step 3: Choose the Dropbox Action

Step 4: Complete the Action Fields

The final step is creating your action fields. Since we're trying to catch everything online and create a double you can leave the File URL box alone.

Next you have the Dropbox folder path. This is the Dropbox folder your photos land in. You want all your photos from every service funneling into one folder. For our purposes we'll call this folder "Digital Doubles" (although if you're using Dropbox's auto photo upload feature for your SD card pictures you might want to use the same folder, "Camera Uploads").

Forward Email Attachments to Your Doubles Folder

Download Images from Any RSS Feed

If you don't want to deal with email you can also use an RSS trigger if your cloud photo service supports it (Picasa and Fotki and both do). Select "Feed" as your trigger channel, copy and paste the URL for your photos RSS feed, and follow steps three and four above.

iCloud to Dropbox

Finally, if you're an iCloud user you can automate your iCloud photos following Apple blog TUAW's guide using the automated organizer Hazel.

Get the Rest of Your Pictures in Order

Not every picture in your life is taken by you or has you tagged in it. So, what about one-off pictures you find on someone's Facebook page, or an event photo you want to grab? For those pictures we'll use the SideCloudLoad bookmarklet:

In the "Dropbox Directory" box, type the directory you want it to go to (Digital Doubles in our example).

Select "Automatic Upload."

Click "Create Bookmarklet," and wait a couple seconds for a link to generate.

Drag that link to your bookmarks bar of your browser.

When you find a picture online you want to include in your doubles album, simply copy the image URL, click the SideCloudLoad bookmarklet, and paste the link. It will automatically upload to your Digital Doubles folder.